December 31, 2009

Happy New Year!

Yahoo!

My blog is all caught up! Awesome, right?!  🙂

If you are looking for some great blog posts, you’ve come to the right place!  Scroll down…WAY DOWN, and then keep on going!

I hope you’ve all had a safe and joyful holiday season! We’ll see you next year with the goal of no more pretending!

Happy New Year!!

Gingerbread Houses!

This year we had a lot of fun building gingerbread houses!

Have you ever bought a pre-made gingerbread house from the store?  You know, the kind that as the plastic foundation, all the pre-cut gingerbread slices and the pre-set candy to decorate?  You always think they are a good idea in the store, because they look so cute and you think “that looks so easy, I can do that!”

Don’t worry, we thought that too.  Jas and I got together with Malcolm and Laura a few weeks before Christmas to make these “amazing little houses” and get in the Christmas spirit.  Lets just say by the end of the night we were in the Christmas spirit, but we had no houses.  Wonder why… keep reading.  🙂

This is what the Gingerbread house looks like on the box… so cute right?!

Ya, right!

This is what they really look like when you make them…

Bad Idea.

This was the front, and it gets worse… check out the back…

Yep, still a bad idea.

LOL!  The frosting would not keep things in place!  Which resulted in adding more frosting, which resulted in a disaster!  I used to think these were “fail safe houses” and that anyone could get them to turn out AMAZING.  Wow, I was so wrong.   Although they turned out to be a total disaster, we still had fun making them.

The Masterpiece!

The Masterpiece…well, kind of.

Mal & Laura!

Merry Christmas!

cheese!

Family Traditions!

Traditions are the best, especially new ones!

Last year Jason’s family started a new tradition where each year during the holiday season the family attends a Christmas concert, play, or program together…so fun!

So last year in order to kick off the first annual Christmas tradition we went to the Kurt Bestor concert.  Kurt Bestor plays the piano and puts on a live Christmas program each year at Abravanel Hall in Salt Lake City.  The show draws more than 20,000 people and features 45 musicians, awesome lighting, and a special guests (which was his dad this year) who reads The Night Before Christmas to the audience before the show is over.  We had a great time!

As you walk out of the concert this is what you see.  It was beautiful.

This year we went to the Forgotten Carols by Michael McLean and it was wonderful.  The play is about  Constance who is a middle-aged nurse whose empty life is changed by a new patient who tells her the story of Christ’s birth as told from the perspectives of lesser-known characters in the nativity story.  Their personal accounts help her discover what the world has forgotten about Christmas, and open her heart to the joy of season.  There are so many touching moments in the play.  Be sure if you see it to bring a tissue box.

My favorite part was at the very end when Michael McLean asks everyone in the audience to reverently sing “we can be together forever some day, we can be together forever someday, we can be together forever someday.”  As everyone is singing, he asks you to think about the people you will be together with forever someday.  It was such an amazing moment where I felt the truth of the statement and the joy of the season.